Original broadcast on WQUD 107.7 FM November 12, 2025 – River Cities’ Reader publisher Todd McGreevy and WQUD GM Aaron Dail bid Neil Young a happy eightieth birthday, extol Gov’t Mule’s cover of Black Sabbath’s War Pigs, and give big ups to the Reader’s promotion of Jason Bermas’s Deep in The Weeds: A Rough Cut — Bermas himself being a recurring feature on WQUD. (JB can also be heard on his podcast, Making Sense of the Madness with Jason Bermas.) McGreevy and Dail run through their disagreement about the influence of AI: Dail thinks it’s insidious all around, while McGreevy believes its application in the arts, particularly music, will be salutary (perhaps as long as musicians use AI to help figure out how their individual arrangements are going to sound, and not act as a replacement for their own creativity, by which point AI will be using other AI results for its search parameters and wind up producing an incestuous beast of tired clichés and banal sounds which no one will want to listen to, and the market will respond accordingly).

Dail sounds ready to start scrutinizing McGreevy’s human autonomy, but instead talks about his own anxieties about AI’s palpable impact on the economy, allowing himself to let McGreevy off the hook (for now). Then he segues to his appreciation of Rich Miller’s 27 October 2025 column (about the Illinois Federation of Teachers’ demand for $4.6 billion in funds that the state budget cannot disburse because they aren’t there). Dail believes Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to be little more than Jackie Chiles writ municipally (JC being the Johnny Cochrane pastiche portrayed by Phil Morris on Seinfeld — you’ll notice they share the same initials [touches nose]). Given the applause-seeking, content-free speeches Mayor Johnson has been giving over the past year, that conclusion has a solid basis in the real world.

Concerning the contents of the November edition of River Cities’ Reader, there is a transcript of the October 16, 2025 speech given by David K Clements at the Scott County Republican Party Reagan Dinner, which was a well-attended event, with Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate and Attorney General Brenna Bird at the head table with Clements as well as dozens of Republican legislators and candidates from all over Iowa in the 400+ audience. Clements’ speech, concerning how election integrity can be upheld, was a real speaking-truth-to-power moment. Clements made the 2023 documentary Let My People Go, a two-hour program that’s worth sitting still for.

Adorned by a lovely illustration by Ed Newman, Kathleen McCarthy’s If It Can Happen in Mesa County, Colorado, It Can Happen in Scott County, Iowa, which discusses the chain of custody of ballots cast and how some common-sense issues — ballots sent by mail, for example — seem to cause the counters to spit out their skulls in confusion. It’s especially egregious when, in Scott County, the average voter has no conception of the chain-of-custody-of-ballots policy — indeed, after a quarter-century of transparency, that voter isn’t even allowed to know how that chain is arranged or how the language spells it all out. It’s confidential; you wouldn’t understand; in fact, the more you know, the greater the chance that certain vectors within the process can be weaponized against it.

Really. This isn’t as complex a subject as certain officials would make it out to be. But treating it as if it were a row of cellular cultures under glass being used to track the life of an illness? That’s creating a layer of obfuscation that is designed to make the eyeballs of even a dedicated politico glaze over in incomprehension. Which would be simply ridiculous if the effects weren’t in service of some really craven perspectives. How can one figure out how the democratic process in a republican system even works if the gatekeepers act like Druids monitoring the safety of a bunch of rocks?

Among the less pressing matters in this edition is “The Story Has to Go on”: Fourth Wall Films’ The Last to Fall From Hero Street, November 8 at the Putnam Museum and Science Center by Jonathan Turner and Mike Schultz’s review of “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere,” the majestically ordinary biopic of New Jersey’s The Boss. Don’t get us wrong: Culture is dead important. But your future won’t be determined by whether or not anyone can make a biopic about Bruce Springsteen that doesn’t indulge in the sort of clichés that Jake Kasdan eviscerated so beautifully in the 2007 film Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, will it? Of course not. (Aired 12 November 2025)